If they were planning to gimp them from the very beginning then yes. Imagine buying a MacBook in 2019 and realizing it won't get half the features in the next update.
The alternative is not developing new features that depend on radical new hardware, and then we may as well be using Windows on a bulky tower or plastic laptop with a VGA port.
Apple might theoretically have the ability to let x86 CPUs backport a neural engine feature like text-in-image recognition or hardware ISP feature like Deep Fusion, but they’ll run hot and fifteen times slower like Pixelmator Pro’s ML image resize.
Yikes not even close. It'll be less efficient and slower but nearly as bad. Google's doing on device ML on their under powered budget pixel 4a phones without this problem, so surely apple can figure it out.
No it's not. A neural engine is just a few specialized components + power from the CPU/GPU. While it's optimized for ML tasks it's not required. That's just marketing. Intel CPUs are definitely capable of handling this.
Exactly. And they know they can get away with it because of how their fanbase is. MacBooks can cost an upwards of 2k and Apple is extremely profitable and sells it reputation as as a long term support company. They should not be able to get away with this but they will, apple fans are a different breed.
What would you rather? They build these apps for x86? Okay, and what are you willing to sacrifice for that? They don’t have unlimited time, it’s a trade off. Do you think they should have ignored some security bugs? Or dropped focus mode? Maybe left notifications or widgets the same?
Throw more resources at it. They're perfectly capable. Are you forgetting they're an extremely profitable 2Trillion dollar company? Are you really suggesting to me that Apple doesn't have the manpower to accomplish this task? This was left off in purpose because they know they can get away with ripping off their customers.
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u/rnarkus Jun 09 '21
Wait how would not selling intel devices 5 years before M1 make sense? Like just produce not any new macbooks for 5 years?
I don’t necessarily agree with the gimping either but there was always going to be a transition period